Josef Dabernig / Deimantas Narkevičius — Rules of the Game

Opening, May 29, 2008, 7 pm
Exhibition, May 30 – July 4, 2008

The nice thing about football is the way it lets us legitimately enjoy forgetting. Germany, a Summer Fairytale, reminded us of this fact in 2006. “We are European champions” was the headline already chosen months in advance of the Euro 2008 cup by an economically faltering Austrian state that is nonetheless in love with itself. This June, while several teams vie for the title in a stadium that’s just as impressive as its financing is uncertain, located just a few meters from the Kunstraum Lakeside, we will be showing Wisla by Josef Dabernig, a football film devoted to those phantasms peculiar to the ideologically inflated sporting event. In the prelude to the WM 2006, however, a darker side of this kind of event was discussed intensively and campaigned against – forced prostitution and trafficking in women, a parallel economy to the populace-uniting spectacle of sport. With the film Matrioskos by Deimantas Narkevičius, we present an artistic reflection not only on this shadow economy, but also on the way the mass media relish these realities accompanying football. What unites the two films is an artistic contemplation on the relationship of authentic to staged images and on the irresistible desire to repeat the same images again and again.

Deimantas Narkevičius (b. Lithuania, 1964) lives and works in Vilnius.